The KOffice project today announced the release of KOffice 1.1.1.
KOffice is a free, Open Source, integrated office
suite demonstrating the richness and power of the KDE development environment.
The release, out less than
three months after the long-anticipated KOffice 1.1 hit the KDE ftp
servers, mainly improves performance, printing (particularly inKWord), and stability.
The announcement
contains links to the source and a number of binary packages, as well as
a summary of the changes. A moredetailed
changelog is available at theKOffice website. The next release will
likely be released shortly after KDE 3.0, sometime in the first quarter of 2002.Update Tuesday December 18, @11:42 pm: Timothy Butler wrote in to tell us thatOpen for Business is running a mini-review of KOffice, and it's readiness for enterprise deployment.

Comments

The other day I was using KWord on a university machine (rh 7.1). I thought it looked pretty impressive, and had little trouble typing up my document. The document looked great on my monitor, but after picking up the hard copy from the printer I nearly fell over laughing. The printout looked nothing like the print-preview (or whatever koffice calls it) on my screen. The margins were way out of wack and the font size was probably double what I specified. I really hope there has been some work fixing up these types of bugs, because other than that it appeared to be a solid product.

Nonetheless, thanks for all the hard work. I look forward to trying out the latest KOffice.

Some time back I created a two page ad pamplate with kword. It was quite complex. Around a dozen frames in one page full of graphics and fancy windows fonts etc. It worked perfectly.

Later I printed it to a .ps file. Converted it to pdf(because I don't have a printer. Need to go to a cyber cafe to get a printout. And they have only windows). Originally the job was scheduled for pagemaker but I asked my friend to spare 20 minutes and it was done.

May be people experiencing problem with printing, try to print to a .ps file. If gv shows it as intended I suppose there is little reason for not being as intended on paper. It worked for me. Try it out.

This kind of problem does not occur only in KWord, the KOffice suite or whatever. This is a common problem with all *nix printing and a very frustrating one at that.

Going from my experience I got out of my desktop publishing days way back in the late '80s/early '90s, one of the most probable causes of all of this is that there does not seem to be any integrated font-management between the display and the printing system. Another one is that all the renderers seem to be seperate and are not sharing some common engine.

Not being an active coder (except for some desktop database scripting and the odd shell script or SQL script here and there), I could be wrong here. But judging from a cursory gander at how things seem to work, printing wise, under both GNOME, KDE and anything else (like, printing using the Motif-based NetScape Navigator), this is the most reasonable hypothesis I could come with.

Printing is the Achilles heel of the OSS movement and they will need to address it if they want to take over The Desktop (TM). If Joe Schmoe typical IT architect can't get his 40 page technology analysis report printed for the 14:00 meeting downtown, how do you want him to recommend a switch to OSS?

CUPS does not fix the problem with the fact that printouts don't match what's on the screen (fonts/graphics bigger/smaller than expected, etc.). It is a part of the solution, not the solution itself.

Unless proven wrong, I maintain it's the lack of integrated font management (and even renderers!) that makes printing under KDE, GNOME et al not compare well at all with the leading commercial, closed-source desktop environments (MacOS, Windows).

Qt3.0 supports embedding TT fonts in a Postscript output - so you will have an integrated font management. I think that having two renderers ( Postscript an X11 ) isn't a disadvantage - you can have a print server running without X ( or even networked postscript printer ), you can generate reports from your console only server, today even a single page often have about 10MB of pixel data ( *100 send by network, stored in a queue like in Windows ? ) and remote X server would have to send a rasterized output back to the main computer, we have command-line tools like Tex, frame buffer versions of programs with printing, support for high-quality printing hardware etc. The problem is a low quality of ghostscript, especially no driver support.

I do see a possible step in the right direction with Qt 3.0, judging from your description. Question is, will this embedding mecanism you allude to ensure that if I want a font "about this big" in my document, that it will come about the same size and not twice as big/smaller on paper?

I hope that KSpread has got (or is getting) a zoom function and can (or will be able to) scale the worksheet down when printing. Even playing with Ghostscript didn't seem to be able to help me in this matter - indeed, the PS viewer, when asked to view A2 pages (which I wanted to scale down to A4) just crashed.

KSpread does show some promise, but it is slow and, without a zoom function, it is frustrating to use. Still, at least it compiled from source alright - I never managed to get Kivio compiled and running...

I would tend to disagree with those observations, you have to remember many people think KDE's design looks nicer than Win2k (that includes myself). There are many things you can do to improve the style though, if you prefer the WinXP look or Win2k look... give dotNet (oh, what is it, it's dot something) or QTWin styles a try. Personally I really like Mosfet's liquid, or the QNiX style.

The point being there is a style that nearly everyone is going to think is "pretty." You do have a point about the menu bars though...

I would tend to disagree with those observations, you have to remember many people think KDE's design looks nicer than Win2k (that includes myself). There are many things you can do to improve the style though, if you prefer the WinXP look or Win2k look... give dotNet (oh, what is it, it's dot something) or QTWin styles a try. Personally I really like Mosfet's liquid, or the QNiX style.

The point being there is a style that nearly everyone is going to think is "pretty." You do have a point about the menu bars though...

Hey everyone, lets give a round of applause for David Faure, Laurent Montel, Igor Jannsen, Rob Buis, Werner Trobin, Lukas Tinkl and a countless cast of others. Has anyone ever sat back and remarked how far KOffice has come since it was started? I mean how long did it take M$ Office or Star Office to get this far? I mean look how long Applixware flailed along, and that was $100 a copy.

These people trully do deserve a round of applause, or at least a drink at the local pub.

Uh, that can be extended. Who needs abiword and gnumeric when you have openoffice?

Who needs openoffice when you can run Microsoft Office perfectly on wine?

Anyways, I like koffice because of it's features. I only really use kword, but it's frames are inheriently much more powerful than abiword/starwriter/msword. This is why the pros use adobe framemaker ;)

I look forward to the day abiword has equivalent functionality to at least wordpad, never mind a real word processor. It starts faster than wordpad ever did, and is beautifully stable. It just doesn't do very much unless you just want to write a business letter, which covers about 10% of what I need to do and I'm not exactly a big office document guy.

I look forward to the day OpenOffice/StarOffice integrates nicely with both KDE and GNOME. I use it an awful lot but for christ's sake I can't even cut from a konsole and paste into Starwriter.

And I look forward to the day koffice is stable, prints well and imports MS Word documents. Doing a document in Starwriter (or really, Word itself) feels really constricting to me, but the last time I tried to do a nice multi-frame layout in kword 1.1 (a six-column CD booklet) it cored on me.

My money's on OpenOffice because right now it seems to have the momentum and is actually usable by real people (who can't afford to say "don't send me that DOC garbage, I only use free software" to their paying clients.) But I will happily switch to KWord when the time comes because I like the DTP model much better than the "blank piece of paper" method. Bit snappier too. I don't understand why they haven't pulled the document filter code out of Openoffice yet, but I suppose stability should come first.

I look forward to the day abiword has equivalent functionality to at least wordpad, never mind a real word processor. It starts faster than wordpad ever did, and is beautifully stable. It just doesn't do very much unless you just want to write a business letter, which covers about 10% of what I need to do and I'm not exactly a big office document guy.

I look forward to the day OpenOffice/StarOffice integrates nicely with both KDE and GNOME. I use it an awful lot but for christ's sake I can't even cut from a konsole and paste into Starwriter.

And I look forward to the day koffice is stable, prints well and imports MS Word documents. Doing a document in Starwriter (or really, Word itself) feels really constricting to me, but the last time I tried to do a nice multi-frame layout in kword 1.1 (a six-column CD booklet) it cored on me.

My money's on OpenOffice because right now it seems to have the momentum and is actually usable by real people (who can't afford to say "don't send me that DOC garbage, I only use free software" to their paying clients.) But I will happily switch to KWord when the time comes because I like the DTP model much better than the "blank piece of paper" method. Bit snappier too. I don't understand why they haven't pulled the document filter code out of Openoffice yet, but I suppose stability should come first.

Of course you can't cut from a console. What do you expect to happen if you cut text from a vi session?

On the other hand, if you mean copy and paste from a konsole to StarOffice, it does work just fine.

Select what you want copied in the konsole (of course you can't copy with ctrl-c!), then paste on StarOffice with Ctrl-v. You can't paste in StarOffice with middle-button because StarOffice uses the button for something else.

Tested right now, using SO5.2 and KDE 2.2.2.

And it really amazes me how people keep on complaining that existing features are not there!
If you don't know how to do it, ASK HOW IT IS DONE! Don't assume that it doesn't exist just because you don't know how to do it!

Actually, I was talking KDE 2.1.1 and StarOffice 6 beta. Select text in the konsole, try pasting in SO6 with the middle button or C-V, and you get either nothing or what was on the SO clipboard. It is a documented SO6 problem, not a KDE problem. In case I didn't make it clear enough, it's also the one and only problem I've noticed with that otherwise excellent beta, which is far stabler and full of working features than most actual point releases I've used on the desktop.

I hear now that the clipboard issue has been fixed in the latest builds of OpenOffice. Next time I have time to download 75 megs I may just grab that (if I don't spend my bandwidth on moving to KDE 2.2.2 so I can assign a keyboard shortcut to "show desktop.") As with Netscape and Mozilla, it may be that OpenOffice ends up being the one that shines.

I really like KOffice but IMHO is far away from apllications like StarOfice or Office XP. Is like notepad (for now). You can't really right a medium document on it :(. And the printing is really bad, i mean untill the WYSIWYG is not implemented i don't want to work with koffice.

Imagine How much SUN spent on Research and Development on StarOffice? KOffice is an Open Source effort. If someone could spend 1/4 of the Staroffice's spending on KOffice, you can see the difference. BTW KDE is not a Company, and KOffice is not a product (software meant to be sold) but a creation for everyone using Unix.

I know and i apreciate the effort on developing koffice but what i want it to say is that koffice is now in a shape that can do almost nothing right: the first thing that should be done in this way is WYSIWYG !!! After is implemented the koficce should be pretty good.

*sigh* ok, after a while it gets really tiring to listen to users go on and on and on about the same things when they: A) aren't doing anything to make it better (e.g. coding, creating icons, designing dialogs or other UI elements with Designer, documentation writing, etc) and B) don't have the foggiest idea about what is cooking with regard to development at the moment.

codre, were you aware that probably the biggest development in KWord in CVS is WYSIWYG printing (thanks David!)?

with open source you don't have a bunch of marketers giving you ideas and phrases to parrot about: you are left to educate yourself. you can do this by reading mailing lists, community news pieces, or talking with people in the know. i know this is a difficult task to bear, but it's part of the price of Free software. but if you don't know, it might be a good idea not to open one's mouth (unless it's a question or bug report, of course =)

This is why I can't see why some "fanatic" open-source people feel *all* software *should* be open source. Of course you should be able to pay for finished software that "just works" if you want to. Open source should be an alternative to proprietary sw for people who are interested in computers and software. (And that's exactly what it is. ;))

here's a "humerous" thought to go along with your reasoning: if the users of open source software paid for its development (or at least defrayed its costs), they would not only get away with a fraction of the cost of proprietary products but would probably get higher quality products in a smaller time frame. as an additional bonus, by virtue of their license those pieces of software would have a guarantee to the continued availability and freedom of that software.

this is, of course, exactly what happens when you buy a packaged distribution.

I can't see why that is humerous... perhaps somewhat ironic. ;) But I can see that it's true.

I guess it all boils down to developers thinking either "If I do this, KDE will be better, and I will be a part of KDE konquering the world, and I'm even getting paid for it!", versus "If I do this, I won't get fired". ;)

Sun did _not_ develop StarOffice, StarDivision did. Sun _is_ updating it and _did_ Open it (most of it). This was a bright move from Sun, since it makes them more the white knight and provides a terrifying (to Microsoft) competitor to MS-Office.

Yes, StarOffice is competing with KOffice, and as a drop-in MS-Office replacement is at the moment much more complete. KWord really lacks polish compared to MS-Word or StarOffice and has (or at least had, in the case of the printing-crushed-together bug, thank goodness that's gone) some showstopper problems.

OTOH, KWord has the right feature set (frames etc) to replace MS-Publisher as well (which StarOffice has as yet no direct answer to even in principle) wihtout a great deal of tweaking. A nice interactive K component for SQL would complete the suite by conceptually replacing MS-Access, and KOffice - large though it is getting - is lightness incarnate when compared with StarOffice.

I know of no other window manager that allows you to drag a track from an *audio* CD and drop it into a sound editor. Making the sound editor a K component would complete the set. That kind of works-the-same-everywhere is Bill's wettest dream for Windows, and KDE is beating him to it. Letting KWord usefully import MS-Publisher files, and usefully export (ie with images etc) HTML would line it up as a competitor for three Microsoft products (Publisher, FrontPage, Word) in one application. KDE already has the kind of network transparency that applications like FrontPage lie awake longing for. (-:

And now you thnink only because SO is done by a big company it must be much better than the free software project?? Give me a break. If this was true Linux wouldn't have been around after all. I actually like KOffice very much and I think it has a lot of potential, it just needs more time to mature. And I also think tons of features in SO and OfficeXP aren't even needed so KOffice can compete very well.

Sun did _not_ develop StarOffice, StarDivision did. Sun _is_ updating it and _did_ Open it (most of it). This was a bright move from Sun, since it makes them more the white knight and provides a terrifying (to Microsoft) competitor to MS-Office.

Yes, StarOffice is competing with KOffice, and as a drop-in MS-Office replacement is at the moment much more complete. KWord really lacks polish compared to MS-Word or StarOffice and has (or at least had, in the case of the printing-crushed-together bug, thank goodness that's gone) some showstopper problems.

OTOH, KWord has the right feature set (frames etc) to replace MS-Publisher as well (which StarOffice has as yet no direct answer to even in principle) wihtout a great deal of tweaking. A nice interactive K component for SQL would complete the suite by conceptually replacing MS-Access, and KOffice - large though it is getting - is lightness incarnate when compared with StarOffice.

I know of no other window manager that allows you to drag a track from an *audio* CD and drop it into a sound editor. Making the sound editor a K component would complete the set. That kind of works-the-same-everywhere is Bill's wettest dream for Windows, and KDE is beating him to it. Letting KWord usefully import MS-Publisher files, and usefully export (ie with images etc) HTML would line it up as a competitor for three Microsoft products (Publisher, FrontPage, Word) in one application. KDE already has the kind of network transparency that applications like FrontPage lie awake longing for. (-:

And now you thnink only because SO is done by a big company it must be much better than the free software project?? Give me a break. If this was true Linux wouldn't have been around after all. I actually like KOffice very much and I think it has a lot of potential, it just needs more time to mature. And I also think tons of features in SO and OfficeXP aren't even needed so KOffice can compete very well.

And now you thnink only because SO is done by a big company it must be much better than the free software project?? Give me a break. If this was true Linux wouldn't have been around after all. I actually like KOffice very much and I think it has a lot of potential, it just needs more time to mature. And I also think tons of features in SO and OfficeXP aren't even needed so KOffice can compete very well.

Sun did _not_ develop StarOffice, StarDivision did. Sun _is_ updating it and _did_ Open it (most of it). This was a bright move from Sun, since it makes them more the white knight and provides a terrifying (to Microsoft) competitor to MS-Office.

Yes, StarOffice is competing with KOffice, and as a drop-in MS-Office replacement is at the moment much more complete. KWord really lacks polish compared to MS-Word or StarOffice and has (or at least had, in the case of the printing-crushed-together bug, thank goodness that's gone) some showstopper problems.

OTOH, KWord has the right feature set (frames etc) to replace MS-Publisher as well (which StarOffice has as yet no direct answer to even in principle) wihtout a great deal of tweaking. A nice interactive K component for SQL would complete the suite by conceptually replacing MS-Access, and KOffice - large though it is getting - is lightness incarnate when compared with StarOffice.

I know of no other window manager that allows you to drag a track from an *audio* CD and drop it into a sound editor. Making the sound editor a K component would complete the set. That kind of works-the-same-everywhere is Bill's wettest dream for Windows, and KDE is beating him to it. Letting KWord usefully import MS-Publisher files, and usefully export (ie with images etc) HTML would line it up as a competitor for three Microsoft products (Publisher, FrontPage, Word) in one application. KDE already has the kind of network transparency that applications like FrontPage lie awake longing for. (-:

Why don't we just focus on a filter to import and export SO docs.
If we had that we could just use the Star Office filters to export and import to any format that SO supports.

Imports would be easy:
Word(or whatever SO supports) -> SO -> KOffice

So would exports
KOffice -> SO -> Any file format that Star Office Exports.

Could someone please explain why we have to have our own filters and keep
reinventing the wheel, when Sun obviously has a large interest in having
SO be completely compatible with MS Office? I'm confused

Because, then you'd have to pull up StarOffice to load your MS documents! That
would be a total PITA. Of course, KDE could also port SO's filters over, but, wait,
THAT'S ALREADY HAPPENING! (sorry for the caps folks, but this time it's needed).

KDE isn't reinventing the wheel, the problem is that the MS file format is a changing,
highly proprietary, badly documented format. The big issue, afaics, is trying to figure
the damn thing out in the first place, rather then writing the code to convert it to
another format.

> If we had that we could just use the Star Office filters
< to export and import to any format that SO supports.

Sure sounds like a good idea. Where's the code?(tm)

> Could someone please explain why we have to have our own
> filters and keep reinventing the wheel, when Sun obviously
> has a large interest in having SO be completely compatible
> with MS Office? I'm confused

There's really nothing to be confused about.

It goes like this.

Someone (apparently not you) is actually writing code for KOffice. That person wants to write their own filters. Who knows why? It obviously is not someone being paid by you, so they can spend their freetime how they choose, right?

So please stop criticizing people that actually do something.

If you want SO office filters to work, start a project to port them (probably not that hard, I think they are separate plugins, at least it looks that way in the filters subdir of the OO install) and submit them to the KOffice team. In the (very unlikely) event they don't get accepted by the KOffice team, if they are good the distros will include them anyway.